We've spent the last few weeks doing the kinds of errands that don't make great content but quietly add up to a life: sorting trash, planning the garden, driving through the Dordogne with the windows down. Somewhere in all of it, I realized France had changed something in how I think about everyday decisions. Not in a preachy way. More like: when the system around you is designed not to be wasteful, you stop being wasteful too. Without trying. Without even noticing.

More on that below.

I spent the last 20 years in Los Angeles. Recycling was something you did if you remembered to, and the system didn't particularly care either way. You paid a flat rate for trash pickup and whatever happened after that was someone else's department.

Here it works differently. At our local drop-off, recycling is free. Trash costs money. Sort correctly and you spend less. Most people sort correctly. It's not a civic virtue campaign. It's just math.

The soda bottles here have caps with a small tab that keeps the lid attached to the container when you open it. One piece, not two. Doesn't sound like much until you realize it means millions of loose caps don't end up separated from what they belong to. Somebody actually thought through the problem instead of just printing a recycling triangle and calling it done. A similar change occurred with soda cans.

Then there's McDonald's. I know. But walk into a French McDonald's and you'll find multiple sorting stations with clearly labeled categories. Order for dine-in and you get real containers, not disposables. A fast food chain treating single-use plastic like something to design around rather than default to. The whole experience would be unrecognizable to anyone who's only ever eaten at one in the States.

The bigger rabbit hole opened when we started looking at options for the house. Solar has been on our list since we moved in, and once you start researching it here you realize the infrastructure around renewables is set up completely differently than what we knew back home. The government has incentive programs that subsidize a meaningful chunk of installation costs for solar, insulation upgrades, and other efficiency projects. Not a tax credit you wait a year to see. Structured to reduce the upfront number.

But the technology is what actually got me. Two things in particular. The first is a system that captures the heat from your shower's waste water before it goes down the drain and uses it to pre-warm the cold water coming in. You're recycling the energy you already paid to heat. It sounds minor until you think about how much hot water a household burns through in a week.

The second is ground cooling, called an échangeur air-sol or puits canadien. Pipes buried a few meters underground circulate air or liquid through the earth, which stays at a stable cool temperature year-round, and that pre-cooled air circulates through the house. No compressor, no refrigerant, no unit running all summer on electricity. The earth does the work. It's been common in France for decades and it's having a moment again as summers get hotter.

We're not doing all of this tomorrow. But these options exist, they're subsidized, and they're normal. Nobody here is patting themselves on the back for it. It's just how things are built.

I sort without debating it now. I notice packaging. I think about where heat goes. France didn't lecture us into any of this. It just built a place where the easier choice and the better choice are usually the same one.

Most AI builders hand you a good-looking site and call it a day.

Readdy.ai builds you a business. Your site collects leads, takes payments, and answers customer questions 24/7 — through a built-in AI agent that handles inquiries while you're busy running your business.

Design, hosting, SEO, payment, and a tireless AI employee. All in one. $15/month.

Try for Free.

Fuel prices have made the case for shorter trips stronger than it's been in years. The general advice from people who live here is to skip the long-haul this summer and go deeper into what's nearby instead. More trains, fewer airports. Cities you've been putting off. A weekend somewhere that doesn't cost a full day of travel to reach.

We're taking that advice. The Dordogne to Bordeaux is an easy drive. Paris is a couple hours by train. There's a lot of Europe we haven't actually seen yet. This seems like the summer to fix that.